Eccie public review data is being hidden from search engines

[Guest082318]

I'm posting this here because I want to get other contributing members thoughts on this.

Eccie is an information exchange resource and one of the great resources has always been a tool for cross referencing and researching potential providers who are found on other sites like Backpage dot com.

The first thing I always do is Google search the phone number after manually dehookerizing if needed. In the past any Eccie reviews with the same number would be found. I noticed that no Eccie content would show up in the results starting around January. I thought it was an issue with the formatting or just nothing would be found. After reading a negative bait and switch ripoff review I did a test on the number and the review did not show up in the search results. I verified that the url had already been indexed and populated through all the Google caches by doing a cache check.

Using multiple search engine simulators the page was checked and I noticed that all the formatted data (phone, email, url etc..) was surrounded in html comments.

Html comments are used in source code to allow developers and other services to add meta data without it being shown by a browser.

<!-- This is an HTML comment.  anything between the opening and closing tag is not displayed in a browser and not indexed as content by search engines -->

As someone who shares information with the community I feel that PUBLIC content should be discoverable through web searches. From a business perspective I think Eccie is missing page views and losing advertising revenue by not being found in these results. On the other hand this also prevents scrapper sites from republishing content owned by Eccie.

[The Eternal Bachelor]

Try other phone numbers.

I googled an escort's phone number (she came up on the main eccie page under the featured showcases section) and her eccie showcase page was the very first link. The second link was to an eccie review of her.

[~Ze~]

The Motherboard used to intentionally suppress spiders and info in search engines. Discretion was key. Not so much here. I doubt this board has ever or will ever go that route. You are right, all business. Suppression would be bad for business.